Free up storage
How to Find Files Over 10GB on Your Mac (and What's Probably Eating Your Drive)
Find every file over 10GB on your Mac and identify the giants likely behind your full SSD. Smart Folder, Terminal, and the usual suspects.
A file over 10GB is something you should know about. There aren’t many on a typical Mac — usually under ten — and they account for a disproportionate amount of your storage. Find them, decide what’s actually needed, and you can often free 50-100GB without touching anything else.
This guide walks through every reliable way to surface the giants, then breaks down what each common 10GB+ file actually is and whether deleting it is safe.
Smart Folder: the cleanest method
The fastest setup is a saved search. Open Finder and choose File → New Smart Folder.
Click “This Mac” so the search covers your whole drive. Hit the + button, switch the dropdown from “Kind” to “File Size,” set “is greater than” with 10 and the unit GB.
Save the folder, name it something like “10GB+ files,” and add it to the sidebar. From now on you can open this with one click.
Sort by Size to see the biggest first. On most Macs, the top of this list reveals the entire storage problem.
Terminal one-liners
mdfind queries Spotlight from the command line:
mdfind 'kMDItemFSSize > 10737418240'
That number is 10GB in bytes. To make it readable:
mdfind 'kMDItemFSSize > 10737418240' | xargs -I {} du -h "{}" 2>/dev/null | sort -hr
The find command searches the filesystem directly — slower but more thorough:
find / -type f -size +10G 2>/dev/null
The 2>/dev/null part hides permission errors find hits when it can’t read a folder. To search just your home folder, swap / for ~.
For sorted output:
find / -type f -size +10G -exec du -h {} + 2>/dev/null | sort -hr
That gives you a list with sizes, biggest first, including system folders Spotlight might have skipped.
What’s almost always on the list
After running this on hundreds of Macs, the same culprits appear constantly. Here’s what each one is and how to handle it.
Final Cut Pro libraries — Single library files routinely hit 50-200GB. Found in ~/Movies. The library is a package, so it shows as one file. Right-click → Show Package Contents to see the proxy files, renders, and original media inside. Don’t manually delete contents — open the library in Final Cut and use File → Delete Generated Library Files to clean it properly.
Parallels and VMware VMs — A Windows 11 VM with normal use is 60-100GB. Parallels disk images live in ~/Parallels by default; VMware in ~/Documents/Virtual Machines. If you haven’t used a VM in 60+ days, archive it to an external and delete locally.
Photos Library — Your Photos Library.photoslibrary at ~/Pictures/ can pass 200GB on heavy users. If you have iCloud Photos enabled with “Optimize Mac Storage,” macOS keeps lower-res versions locally and downloads originals on demand. The library size you see may not equal what’s actually using local space.
iPhone backups — Local backups in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup are 30-100GB each, and some people accumulate three or four. To list them with sizes:
du -sh ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup/*
Manage backups via Finder by selecting a connected iPhone in the sidebar, or in older macOS via iTunes Preferences.
Time Machine local snapshots — These don’t show in Finder at all. macOS keeps hourly snapshots of your drive locally for up to 24 hours, even when no Time Machine drive is connected. List them:
tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
A snapshot can hold 20+ GB. They’re considered “purgeable” — macOS releases them as needed — but you can force thinning:
tmutil thinlocalsnapshots / 999999999999 4
Xcode DerivedData and simulators — Developers see this constantly. ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData and ~/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator can each pass 50GB. Both regenerate as needed.
Docker.raw — At ~/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/vms/0/data/. This file grows monotonically with use. 80GB+ is common. Reset Docker via the menu bar app to shrink it.
Old macOS installers — “Install macOS Sonoma.app” in /Applications is 12-15GB. After installation, it’s pure dead weight.
Why your free space doesn’t always grow
Delete a 30GB file and check Storage settings — you may see only 10GB more free. This isn’t a bug.
APFS is the filesystem macOS uses, and it has a concept called copy-on-write. When you “delete” a file, the blocks it occupied may still be referenced by snapshots, clones, or Time Machine local backups. The file is gone from your view, but the bytes are still allocated.
Combine this with purgeable space and the math gets fuzzy. macOS counts purgeable bytes as “available” in the Storage view, so deleting purgeable content doesn’t move the needle. Files macOS could automatically purge include Time Machine snapshots and iCloud-offloadable files when “Optimize Mac Storage” is on.
To see truer numbers, run:
df -h /
That shows actual filesystem-level free space without the purgeable accounting tricks.
Sorting Finder by size
If you’d rather skip Terminal, switch any Finder window to List View (Cmd+2). Right-click a column header and turn on Size if it’s hidden, then click Size to sort.
For folders to show their real sizes (Finder doesn’t calculate them by default), press Cmd+J for view options and tick “Calculate all sizes.” On a 95%-full drive, this can take a couple minutes — Finder is reading every folder to total it up.
In Column View (Cmd+3), select any folder and press Cmd+I. Get Info shows the combined size of everything inside.
Decision rules for 10GB+ files
For each file you find, run through this short list:
- Do I have another copy? External drive, cloud, another Mac. If yes, the local one is probably safe to delete.
- When did I last open it? Get Info shows access date. If over a year, you almost certainly don’t need it locally.
- Is the source still available? macOS installers redownload. Apps reinstall. Stock footage redownloads. Original camera footage usually doesn’t.
- Does an active project depend on it? Don’t delete a Final Cut library if you’re still editing the wedding video for delivery next Saturday.
- Is it system-managed? Time Machine snapshots, purgeable cache, simulator data — let macOS or the originating app manage these. Don’t manually delete from /Library.
When to use a cleaner instead
Smart Folders and Terminal commands work, but they show you raw lists. You still have to figure out what each file is, whether it’s safe to delete, and where it came from.
A dedicated cleaning tool catalogs giant files alongside their app context — “this 22GB file belongs to Parallels,” “this 14GB folder is Xcode DerivedData and rebuilds automatically.” For most people, that context-with-deletion is faster than research-then-delete.
Either way, focus your storage cleaning here. Files over 10GB are the lowest-hanging fruit on a Mac. A few good decisions can free more space than weeks of cache clearing.